Cities in the Great Depression

Political centers such as Canada, Texas, Washington, London and Berlin flourished during the Great Depression, as the expanded role of government added many new jobs.

The fall of wheat prices drove many farmers to the towns and cities, such as Calgary, Alberta, Regina, Saskatchewan, and Brandon, Manitoba.

[5] Srigley emphasizes the wide range of background factors and family circumstances, arguing that "gender" itself was typically less important than race, ethnicity, or class.

[7] Singapore, at the time of British colony, was integrated into the world economy and suffered economic declines like other trading cities.

Those who remained in the city used complex relationships among Chinese kinfolk; they shared food, housing, and clothing, and minimized the negative impacts.

[11] Numerous soup kitchens sprang up in Santiago while homeless people begun to dwell in caves in the hills around this city.

The low birth rate of Parisians was compensated by a new wave of immigration from Russia, Poland, Germany, eastern and central Europe, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Lazar Kaganovich was in charge; he designed the subway so that citizens would absorb the values and ethos of Soviet civilization as they rode.

[21] Soviet workers did the labor and the art work, but the main engineering designs, routes, and construction plans were handled by specialists recruited from the London Underground.

[22] The paranoia of Stalin and the NKVD was evident when the secret police arrested numerous British engineers for espionage—that is for gaining an in-depth knowledge of the city's physical layout.

Engineers for the Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company were given a show trial and deported in 1933, ending the role of British business in the USSR.

With the end of large-scale immigration, populations stabilized and the plentiful jobs in the cities pulled families upwards in terms of social mobility.

Investment in office buildings, stores, factories, utilities, streets, and, especially, apartments and single-family homes, added substantially to the infrastructure, and contributed to the notion that better times lay ahead.

Although much needed work was deferred, maintenance and repair of existing structures comprised over a third of the private sector construction budget in the 1930s.

Devastating was the disappearance of 2 million high paying jobs in the construction trades, plus the loss of profits and rents that humbled many thousands of landlords and real estate investors.

Steel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Gary, Indiana, and automobiles in Detroit took the heaviest hits, along with railroads and coal mining.

Unemployment was a problem everywhere, but it was less severe among women than men, among workers in non-durable industries (such as food and clothing), in services and sales, and in government jobs.

The fiscal soundness of city and county governments was challenged by the rise in relief expenditures and the sharp fall in tax collections.

While this expansion may have slowed the rise in unemployment, the spending was a luxury that could not be borne in the face of falling tax revenues and the unwillingness of investors to put more money into municipal bonds.

[26] While local relief before 1932 focused on providing small sums of cash or baskets of food and coal for the neediest, the federal programs launched by Hoover and greatly expanded by the New Deal tried to use massive construction projects with prevailing wages to jumpstart the economy and solve the unemployment crisis.

FERA, WPA and PWA built and repaired the public infrastructure in dramatic fashion but did little to foster the recovery of the private sector.

[27] Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a magnetic appeal to the city dwellers—he brought relief and recognition of their ethnic leaders and ward bosses, as well as labor unions.

Taxpayers, small business and the middle class voted for Roosevelt in 1936 but turned sharply against him after the recession of 1937-38 seemed to belie his promises of recovery.

The vibrant labor unions, heavily based in the cities, likewise did their utmost for their benefactor, voting 80% for him, as did Irish, Italian and Jewish voters.

[28] The American mafia and some other organized crime syndicates, which had emerged during Prohibition, usually retained power despite heavy pressure from the FBI and federal authorities.

[30] The small, desert town of Las Vegas, Nevada began to develop based on vice businesses during this period with the added advantage that laws there were much less strict.